After a few weeks of experimenting on and off I've just managed to get the Imagick extension installed under Apache on Windows (my development environment). While discovering how to make it work was not at all simple the final process of getting all the pieces to play together nicely was pretty easy. In this post I'll briefly discuss what ImageMagick and the Imagick extension for PHP are, why you might want to use them, how I got them up and running and finally a very simple piece of example code. I'm hoping this post will help people avoid the frustration and effort I went through to get them to work!

He explains what the tools (ImageMagick & Imagick) are and why it's a bit more difficult to install them on Windows than just a point and click sort of thing. He walks you through an eight-step process that will have you up and working in no time and includes a simple PHP script you can run to ensure things are working as they should.